A City in Terror Page 10

  In no way intimidated, the police continued with their plans for a meeting in Fay Hall in the South End the following day. On that afternoon a crowd of supporters and the curious gathered under the Dover Street elevated structure in front of the grubby two-story building that served as headquarters for the Boston Street Carmen’s Union. Patrolmen kept arriving by streetcar and elevated train, all apparently in the highest of spirits. Before the meeting animated knots of uniformed men sauntered up and down the sidewalk gesticulating, laughing, talking. The issue, now finally drawn, seemed to give them a sense of relief, almost an air of jollity. Even the old-timers were putting in their appearances, veterans with twenty and thirty years’ service behind them. The night men had left their beds early to attend.

  That the police were about to form a union was now widely known. Nevertheless the union leaders tried to keep their deliberations private and their identities secret. A sergeant-at-arms, stationed at the hall door, scrutinized all those entering and demanded identification from those he did not know. Among those he turned back was the head of a private detective agency.

  The moderates, led by Lynch, hoped to avoid or postpone any irrevocable action. But a vociferous and assertive minority had now swung over the inert majority, who found themselves carried away by the contagious enthusiasm of the militants. In both sessions, with shouts, thumping, cheers and whistles, the policemen overwhelmingly voted to accept the union charter. The Boston Social Club had become the Boston Police Union Number 16,807 of the American Federation of Labor.

  While the police were voting, those gathered outside under the el structure could hear the cheers and applause echoing from behind the closed doors. Then a smiling Frank McCarthy emerged. “Well, I guess I know what you boys are here for,” he told the waiting reporters, “but I can’t say anything.” Scarcely had the meeting adjourned than officials of the other unions began rallying their rank and file to the policemen’s cause. On Saturday, August 16, a group of Boston labor leaders met at the Quincy House to discuss strategy. Although they kept the details to themselves, they let it be known that they were going to set up a “working agreement among policemen, firemen, carmen, and telephone workers,” and they implied that if Curtis persisted in his course, the unions would call a sympathy strike.

  On August 17 the Boston Central Labor Union (BCLU)—the coordinating body of all the AFL unions in the city—held the largest local meeting in a decade at Wells Memorial Hall on lower Washington Street. The mood was militant. A delegate introduced a carefully prepared resolution denouncing Curtis’s actions as “a tyrannical assumption of autocratic authority … foreign to the principle of government under which we live,” and demanding that he revoke his amendment to Rule 35. The delegate congratulated the police for their courage in asserting their rights, promised “every atom of support that labor can bring to bear,” and bade “a hearty welcome to the Policemen’s Union to the ranks of organized labor.”

  In opening the discussion of the resolution, McCarthy called Curtis’s order an attempt not only to undermine the principle of collective bargaining but to attack the American Federation of Labor, which “recognized” the right of a policeman to ownership of himself. The commissioner’s “un-American” action, he told the delegates, “would end by destroying the department’s morale and efficiency, since more than ninety per cent of the force had already joined the new union.” Other speakers insisted repetitively that membership in the AFL in no way hindered a policeman in the discharge of his duties, and they predicted that there would be real trouble ahead if the governor and the mayor supported the commissioner. The BCLU’s business manager told the delegates that “these men are working under the worst conditions of any body of men in this city,” and he warned that they would walk out if even one man was discharged.

  Councilor Moriarty, the last speaker, found himself in the anomalous position of defending a body of men whom he had often previously called strikebreakers. Adopting attack as the best method of defense, he denounced Curtis’s record as mayor, as collector of the port, and as a member of the Metropolitan Park Commission, giving as an example Curtis’s “discharge of three hundred city laborers on Christmas Eve, when he was mayor.” Labor’s battle for the police, Moriarty told them, was a fight for organized labor itself. If Curtis should win his point, other employers would launch similar attacks against their workmen.

  After Moriarty’s speech the delegates enthusiastically and unanimously voted to accept the resolution. Already the firemen’s union, which had evolved from the Russell Club, had passed a resolution supporting the police even to the extent of going on strike. The firemen’s endorsement was followed that evening by the local plumbers, the boilermakers, and Hyde Park Machinists Lodge 391. The business agent of the carmen’s union announced that in the event of a police strike the carmen would refuse absolutely to transport strikebreakers. Labor leaders busied themselves lining up such powerful unions as the telephone operators, the building tradesmen, and the teamsters. Boston’s city council came out “strongly on the side of organized labor.” The Herald estimated that some eighty thousand workers were prepared to strike. Under labor’s smoothly united surface there were, however, fissures, lightly covered over but only waiting to become apparent. For many workmen could recall the indifference, not to say hostility, that the police had shown toward them in earlier strikes. A high-domed helmet still seemed the symbol of the enemy. Furthermore the Central Labor Union itself did not have the power to call a strike. Only the individual unions could do that, and they would not do so without the consent of their entire membership.

  While the Wells Memorial Hall meeting was taking place, a reporter from the Boston Advertiser called Coolidge at Northampton to ask for a statement about the police situation. Coolidge replied in his customary measured manner: “I am thoroughly in sympathy with the attitude of the commissioner as I understand it…. I sincerely hope the matter will be adjusted amicably, but I have every confidence in the ability and judgment of Mr. Curtis and I intend to support him in any action he may take. Mr. Curtis is the police commissioner and I intend to allow him a free hand in the management of the department.”

  The crisis continued to build up like a lowering thundercloud over Boston. Two days after the Wells Hall meeting the Herald editorialized:

  Seldom has the feeling in this community been more tense than it is today over the conditions in the police department. No other topic of conversation approaches it … we are at a turning of the ways. We shall take a long step toward “Russianizing” ourselves, or toward submitting to soviet rule if we, by any pretext, admit an agency of the law to become the servant of a special interest. We have entire confidence that Commissioner Curtis will stand firm. We believe the Governor will be with him. The demagogues of the municipal council see in this affair an opportunity to build up political capital for themselves. We believe the “solid right-thinking people of the state” will take this stand.

  Mayor Peters was too negligible for the Herald to bother to mention.

  It seemed another ominous sign when Superintendent Crowley cut short his vacation to return to his Pemberton Square office opposite the massive granite Suffolk County Court House. Crowley, a stocky, suave Celt, was an easy talker, well liked by his men and by the public. His ancestry had given him a face in which the map of Ireland was still traceable. He had both literally and figuratively kissed the Blarney Stone. It was said that even the dourest Yankee coming into police headquarters with a complaint, after talking with the genial superintendent would on leaving make a donation to the Police Benevolent Fund. Crowley knew the police as Curtis did not, for he had come up through the ranks. As a sergeant, through his skill in solving what became known as the Trunk Murder Mystery—a woman’s body found in a trunk in a lodging house—he was in the ensuing notoriety propelled upward until he at last found himself behind the superintendent’s desk. How he felt about a union he carefully kept to himself, but the patrolmen knew that in a showdown
he would have to back authority, and they bore him no ill will for it. Immediately on his return Crowley called a meeting of captains and department heads. He maintained that the meeting would deal only with routine matters, but the implications were as ominous as were the new orders that kept pouring from the police department. One special order required all sergeants and lieutenants to leave their vacation addresses with their captains. The confrontation that moderates like Lynch had feared now seemed unavoidable. Years later Lynch told a priest that the AFL union was the work of a minority playing on police dissatisfactions, that originally such a union had been neither “the will nor the wish of the majority of the Social Club.”

  The policemen had scheduled another meeting at Fay Hall for Tuesday, August 19, at which, according to the Boston papers, they planned to elect a slate of officers and then demand the commissioner’s official recognition of their union. Meanwhile several labor leaders attempted to gain the governor’s support or at least his neutrality. Coolidge had shown himself sympathetic—overindulgent, in the opinion of many Bostonians—to the carmen in their recent strike, and he was well aware of the power of the labor vote. State Senator George Curran, himself a member of the seventeen-man BCLU advisory committee appointed to deal with the police situation, wrote the governor a letter attacking the commissioner as un-American, and calling his behavior a kind of “Prussianism.” The commissioner’s arbitrary use of power against the unionizing police, Curran told the governor, required his removal from a place of authority no less completely than the Kaiser was removed by American doughboys. He concluded: “Organized labor and the citizens of Boston call for the immediate dismissal of the Hon. Edwin U. Curtis, Police Commissioner of Boston.”

  Coolidge’s reply was negative, indirect, nonspecific. On returning somewhat early from his vacation on August 19, he released a statement to the press that “Mr. Curtis is the police commissioner of Boston invested by law with the duty of conducting the office. I have no intention of removing him as long as he is commissioner and am going to support him.”

  Except for a few brief comments, Curtis kept silent. He declared that his amendment to Rule 35 was clear enough to need no elaboration. When reporters asked him if his stand was his own or whether he had consulted with others, he told them, “Like all prudent men, I have sought advice on this matter from men eminent in the legal profession.” The “eminent” lawyer to whom Curtis had turned was another ingrained Yankee, Herbert Parker, member of the Harvard Class of 1878 and grandson of a Harvard president. Originally the Parkers had been Charlestown settlers but had retreated from Bunker Hill following that town’s invasion by the Irish Famine refugees. They had then gone west to Lancaster in mid-Massachusetts, beyond the reach of the Celts. In spite of his Harvard connection, Parker as a young lawyer gravitated to nearby Worcester rather than to Boston thirty-five miles away. After spending five years in private practice he was appointed an assistant district attorney of Worcester County, then in a few years he advanced to First Special Justice of the Second District of Eastern Worcester. From 1895 to 1899 he served as district attorney. In 1901 he was elected to the first of three annual terms as attorney general of the Commonwealth, his sole elective office.

  Attorney General Parker proved himself a skillful prosecutor whose successes gave him a political as well as a legal standing. Rigid, testy, primly self-righteous, he was nevertheless considered one of the state’s leading lawyers. His own son described him as an “ultra-conservative, anti-union Republican.” In 1917 he was a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, where he served on a number of key committees and distinguished himself by voting against every proposed constitutional change. It was Councilor Moriarty’s attack on the police commissioner at the August 13 session of the convention that brought Parker and Curtis together. Parker, who regarded all unions as an unjustified restraint on trade, and a police union a crime against the Commonwealth, rushed to the aid of Curtis whom he scarcely knew and offered him his assistance in answering Moriarty’s challenge. From that day began a curiously intimate relationship between the two men. Although Parker was six years older, he came in the next few weeks to regard Curtis as almost a father figure. Dropping other legal work, he became Curtis’s trusted consultant. With offices at Barrister Hall, only a few hundred yards from Curtis’s office, he placed himself unreservedly under the Commissioner’s command. Long after the police strike, looking back on those stirring weeks when he was so close to Curtis, he wrote in his Harvard class report: “I view this service as the most inspiring of my professional life, because of my intimate association with, to me, the bravest, wisest and most faithful of all public officials with whom I have had the opportunity to serve.”

  Rumor, reflected in the papers, had it that Curtis and Coolidge were in constant consultation and that the governor would support the commissioner to any length. Coolidge’s secretary then took pointed pains to deny that Coolidge and Curtis had even seen one another. The most that could be said—and Coolidge had said it—was that the governor had no intention of removing the commissioner. Parker nevertheless felt that the governor’s statement had made it possible for the commissioner to take his stand against the police. On that same Tuesday Curtis called in reporters and broke his silence. He told them that since he had received no official notification or evidence of the men’s antagonism either to him or to the rules of the police department, he would do nothing. If, however, he should receive such notification or evidence, he would of course enforce the rules of the department, according to the law. Then, more confidentially, he went on to explain that press reports of police antagonism to the department were untrue. On the contrary his relationship with the rank and file was quite cordial. He pointed out that, like O’Meara before him, he had no objection to the police forming an organization so long as it was not affiliated with an outside group. He himself had helped the men set up the new grievance committee which had granted the men almost all their requests. He had won a salary increase for the department, an increase that he had indicated would pave the way for future increases. He had established a committee to investigate the condition of the station houses and had submitted its report to the mayor with his own urgent requests for immediate action. As proof of his men’s goodwill, he released two laudatory letters to him, one from the secretary of the Social Club, the other from the secretary of the grievance committee.

  What Curtis failed to realize was that in spite of such rhetorical politeness the police had never considered him one of their own, as they had O’Meara and as they did Superintendent Crowley. “Useless Curtis,” they nicknamed him behind his back. The belated pay raise they considered as brought about by their own militancy rather than by any action of his. They were suspicious of the grievance committee. They saw the report on the station houses buried in City Hall. Above all they were now angry and belligerent to a point beyond reason, determined on a showdown and confident that they could win. That evening they came out in open defiance of the commissioner and at their Fay Hall meeting elected a permanent slate of officers for their AFL union.

  President of the new union was Patrolman John F. McInnes of Station 2, a veteran officer, well known and liked, who directed traffic at the intersection of Devonshire and Water Streets in downtown Boston. McInnes, a lean, long-nosed man with bushy eyebrows, was an impressive choice. As a young man he had served with the Seventh Cavalry in the Dakotas and in 1890 had been present at the shooting of Sitting Bull. The following year he left the army to learn the trade of bricklayer. But the Spanish-American War found him too restless to remain a civilian. He joined up in time to be with Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. In November 1898 he was mustered out, but a few months later he again enlisted. By 1906 he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant. He then quit the service for the Boston Police Department. When the United States declared war in 1917, he joined the army for the fourth time, going overseas with the AEF and returning to the police department after the armistice. In 1912
he had been elected vice-president of the Boston Social Club and later vice-president and director of the Boston Police Relief Association. When a post of the American Legion was organized in South Boston, he became its first commander. Honored and respected as he was, McInnes gave a solid standing to the nascent union. The other officers elected were:

  VICE PRESIDENT:

  John F. Whitten—Division Ten, Roxbury Crossing.

  FINANCIAL SECRETARY:

  Michael L. King—Division Nine, Dudley Street.

  RECORDING SECRETARY: William P. Willis—Division Ten.

  GUIDE: John Maloney—Division Four, LaGrange Street.

  GUARDIAN: William Brown—Division Sixteen, Back Bay.

  TRUSTEES:

  James L. Butler—Division Nineteen, Mattapan.

  Thomas J. Driscoll—Division Three, Joy Street.

  Michael Joyce—Division Twelve, South Boston.

  DELEGATES TO THE BCLU:

  Stephen J. Dunleavy—Division Three.

  John P. Whitten—Division Ten.

  Phillip Corbett—Division Five, East Dedham Street.

  Stephen Ryder, Jr.—Division Two, City Hall Ave.

  James L. Butler—Division Nineteen.

  William P. Willis—Division Ten.

  James G. Peters—Division Eleven, Dorchester.

  George E. Ferreira—Division One, Hanover Street.

  Hugh Garrity—Division Two.

  McInnes’s first public statement was a mild one. “I decry strike talk,” he said, adding that “the officers of the Union wish to state that their relations with Police Commissioner Curtis are pleasant, although there is a dispute concerning the rights of our members to organize.”

  Curtis learned of the meeting shortly after it adjourned. By six o’clock next morning, Wednesday, he was at his desk in Pemberton Square. At once he issued a special order summoning eight patrolmen who were leaders in organizing the union to police headquarters. The eight arrived at nine-thirty. For the next two and a half hours, with a department secretary recording the answers, Superintendent Crowley interrogated the men as to their length of service, their union membership and their roles in founding the union, and their awareness of the meaning of amended Rule 35. One by one the eight left the building, the last man at noon.